As the slaughter of Jewish children reopens old wounds... murder bigotry and a stain on the honour of France

None of us can be anything but appalled by the monstrous murders of a Jewish teacher and three schoolchildren aged three, six and eight at a school gates in Toulouse.

France and its people are reeling with shock, and showing an understandable combination of national grief and anger at what appears to have been a racially motivated act.

President Nicolas Sarkozy — who is himself part-Jewish — is of course right to state: ‘We will not give in to terror,’ and to take the prompt security steps he has, such as posting armed guards at Toulouse schools, and to declare an unprecedented ‘scarlet’ alert.

He is also right to hold a minute’s silence in all French schools to commemorate both the Jewish victims as well as the two Muslim and one Caribbean soldier who were gunned down in a separate but surely related incident.

In league with the Nazis: Petain, leader of Vichy France, meeting Hitler in 1940

So young: The bodies of four victims of the shootings lie in shrouds at the Jewish School targeted by an assassin

The fear must be that a French version of the Norwegian neo-Nazi Anders Behring Breivik is on the loose, waiting to strike again in or around France’s third-largest city. Similarly, opposition leader Francois Hollande is right to have suspended his election plan in favour of a period of mourning and contemplation.

But although we all sympathise desperately with the country over this odious and cowardly series of killings, the murders pose painful questions for France.

For, despite being one of the first countries in Europe to give the Jews equality — at the time of the French Revolution in the late 18th century — the foul bacillus of anti-Semitism has never been far from the surface of French national life.

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In this period of mourning, the French will sadly have to reflect on their attitudes to race in general and the Jewish race in particular.

They will also have to consider whether their ‘two-round’ electoral system — in which candidates in the first round of voting are narrowed down to two contenders for the Presidency — actually encourages political extremism as those courting the voters, including Monsieur Sarkozy, promote intolerance and pander to the bigotry of neo-Fascists.

Solidarity: Members of France's Jewish community demonstrate and light candles on Place de la Bastille during a silent tribute march to the victims of the Toulouse school shooting

Suspects: One of these three soldiers posing with a Nazi flag could be the man responsible for a series of shootings in the Toulouse area of France

Only a fortnight before the Toulouse
massacre, the National Front candidate, Marine Le Pen, made the absurd
claim that most of the meat sold in Paris was either halal or kosher.
Christian housewives, she implied, were being sold it without being told
the truth.

It was
rubbish, of course, but before that even had the chance of being
ascertained, President Sarkozy bulldozed into the debate by demanding,
in a naked attempt to capture National Front support, that all meat must
be labelled to show it was not killed according to Muslim or Judaic
ritual.

Marine Le Pen’s father, Jean-Marie Le Pen, the founder of the National Front and for decades its rabble-rousing leader, notoriously denied the existence of the Nazi extermination camps, and stood for office on a disgustingly anti-Semitic platform.

Gendarmes sent thousands to the Nazi death camps

His daughter has tried in recent years
to play down that aspect of her party’s policies, though few are
fooled. Yet unlike the British National Party, the French National Front
is not on the lunatic fringe of politics.

Indeed,
until recently Marine Le Pen looked as though she might even supplant
Sarkozy as a ‘second round’ candidate for the presidential elections,
just as her father supplanted Lionel Jospin in 2002.

French
anti-Semitism has been evident for centuries, despite the French
Revolutionaries according Jews equal rights before the law — something
that Napoleon continued while making several grossly anti-Semitic
remarks himself.

The infamous Dreyfus Case that dragged on from the 1890s to 1906 — in which an innocent Jewish French army captain, Alfred Dreyfus, continued to be persecuted for an espionage crime of which it became increasingly obvious that he was innocent — uncovered the seamy bigotry of the French establishment prior to World War I.

Far worse was the way the Vichy French behaved during World War II, where their officials rounded up and handed over Jews to the German authorities with a ruthless (and often unnecessary) efficiency. The Vichy regime implemented anti-Jewish measures before it was even requested to do so by Berlin, partly in order to keep the property confiscated from the Jews for itself.

Tribute: A man places teddy bears and drawings at a makeshift shrine outside the Ozar Hatorah Jewish school in Toulouse

Although they refused the German
demand that Jews be forced to wear yellow stars, the Vichy French
participated enthusiastically in sending non-French Jews to the death
camps — principally Auschwitz — in a way that the Germans simply did
not have the manpower or local knowledge to achieve.

In the German-Occupied Zone, the story was worse, with the gendarmerie rounding up French and non-French Jews alike.

The
Jewish victims were then taken via Bordeaux to the notorious transit
camp of Drancy outside Paris, and to the Vélodrome d’Hiver sports
stadium inside the city.

They were then sent to their certain death in the camps, with the trains and coaches driven by Frenchmen and the logistics managed by French policemen and fonctionnaires. (When there were too few Jews to justify hiring a coach, they were taken away by taxi.)

They did all they could to stop the creation of Israel

The deportation to Auschwitz of 4,000
Jewish children aged 12 and younger in 1942, after being forcibly
separated from their parents at the vélodrome and starved for a week,
was done not by the Gestapo or the SS but by ordinary Parisian gendarmes
acting under orders from French officials. Altogether, around 77,000
French Jews died in the Holocaust.

One
might have assumed that post-war France would have recompensed the Jews
for this behaviour, but apart from a brief secret alliance during the
Suez Crisis of 1956 — in which Israeli actions suited the French anyhow —
France has proved a faithless friend or overt opponent of Israel,
especially since the 1967 Six-Day War.

In his superb 2006 book Betrayal: France, The Arabs And The Jews, the historian David Pryce-Jones tells of centuries of ‘astonishing anti-Jewish animus’ in the archives of the French foreign ministry, the Quai d’Orsay.

The French did everything they could to impede the creation of the Jewish state in 1948, and later to stymie Israeli foreign policy.

Mr. Pryce-Jones describes how French diplomats have an ‘extraordinarily fantastic interpretation of what’s going on in the Arab world and in the Jewish world’, despite their individually being very sophisticated people.

The French supported Gaddafi, selling him arms even when they had sanctions against Israel, but after he turned out to be unstable they instead turned to Saddam Hussein and Yasser Arafat, who for years became, as Mr Pryce-Jones puts it, ‘the two pillars of French foreign policy. Both Hussein and Arafat run strictly counter to every value France has produced … yet France funded the Osirak nuclear plant in Iraq, which the Israelis had to destroy in 1981’.

So when the French establishment marches in solemn — and heartfelt — condemnation of these Toulouse killings, there should also be cause for deep reflection over the question of whether anything will genuinely change in the long, sorry story of French anti-Semitism.